Hedge fund - Reporting Automation

Challenge

The hedge fund used various legacy methods and systems, including CSV files, Excel spreadsheets, and MS Access databases to store their data. In addition, the asset allocation, portfolio, and P&L data was being manually extracted from Advent’s Moxy trade order management system and Axys® portfolio management solution.

Solution

The HBM team understood the challenge and documented the requirements of the project. The team subsequently designed a new database architecture, based on the data dictionary derived by analyzing various data sources and the final reporting requirements.

The team then designed and developed a software application that intelligently gathered data, analyzed and generated reports, and performed repetitive IT tasks on a nightly basis, as soon as the data was available after market close.

Result

By centralizing data from various sources into one central data source, as well as automating the report generation, based on compliance and other internal requirements, the hedge fund had their reports generated that same evening, soon after market close.

The reports were automatically generated and delivered to the involved parties within an hour of market close. In addition, HBM recommended that the software designed have reconciliation checks at various stages to ensure the data integrity and validity, which practically erased any erroneous reports.

Major Benefits

Timely & Accurate Reporting

The automation allowed the entire reporting process and the reports to be more predictable and reliable. The daily reports and older archives became available through a centralized dashboard to the management without having to manually search for them or ask the operations team when needed.

Exceptional Return on Investment

According to the Chief Operating Officer, the man hours saved by automation allowed at least one full-time role to be dedicated to other functions within the company. A full-time role saved them anywhere from $75,000 - $90,000 per year. This amounts to over $750,000 in savings over a ten-year period.

Highly Efficient Workload Management

According to the COO, the biggest advantage of this new solution is that this allowed them to better utilize their small team and get more work done, while keeping the team small. The middle and back office operations team no longer need to gather data manually from various sources, and then reconcile the data after generating the reports.